[HN Gopher] BGP.Tools: Browse the Internet Ecosystem
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BGP.Tools: Browse the Internet Ecosystem
Author : RGBCube
Score : 281 points
Date : 2025-07-24 01:12 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bgp.tools)
(TXT) w3m dump (bgp.tools)
| dapperdrake wrote:
| This tool looks really good. It seems like soon ASN level bot-
| curbing will become common.
| RGBCube wrote:
| It is really good for blocking whole Chinese & LLM scraper
| ASNs!
| LohnChen wrote:
| why u have to mention Chinese?
| RGBCube wrote:
| Anyone who has operated a public webserver knows that the
| vast majority of the rabid, robots.txt ignoring
| hyperscrapers are from Chinese autonomous systems
| ranger_danger wrote:
| cidr-report.org has been around for over 20 years, curious why
| you think this site now will make a difference with blocking
| bots?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Most people don't know about it; in fact most of the IP
| geolocation providers pull their data from cidr-report.org or
| thyme.apnic.net.
| zinekeller wrote:
| I'm not shocked. ASN blocking is well-known among people
| who I can easily called experts (veterans which can set up
| a reasonable-ish firewall from base principles) and ASN
| control is exposed in major cloud firewalls, but younger
| people (except those who were trained with deep networking
| skills) don't really understand ASNs for some reason.
| TheBoozyGenius wrote:
| Pretty zany.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| A while ago there was a large data center outage that effected a
| lot of popular services and I speculated it might have been BGP,
| but it wasn't.
|
| During that time I was trying to learn BGP on-the-fly enough to
| know if this was a thing and I didn't have a lot of luck.
|
| What are some good methods or tools to know if BGP is causing a
| large scale outage before other experts have reported it?
| dgl wrote:
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing might be of interest for
| aggregated data that doesn't require a complete understanding
| of the internet. The global looking glass that bgp.tools has is
| pretty powerful too, but it gives you a lot of data, so if you
| don't know what you're looking for or what it should look like
| it's hard to say something is wrong.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Its usually not BGP, its some operator misconfiguring BGP, and
| there's loads of ways of doing that and its hard to know what
| that would look like from a remote view like your own network.
| Most efficient way is to just compare current bad state to
| previous good state and look at the diff, ie what changed for
| some prefix in your table compared to previous version of your
| table.
| rumblefrog wrote:
| I find the map the most interesting map: https://map.bgp.tools/
|
| And did not know Mercedes holds such a large block (53.0.0.0/8),
| and it appears to be mostly dark or unused.
| mike_d wrote:
| The map also does a good job showing why we need to do away
| with multicast/class E and reuse the address space.
| kortilla wrote:
| You can't use multicast because multicast addresses work
| today on private networks
| doughecka wrote:
| Lol, then what do we do with all the multicast traffic?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Surely something from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses could be
| repurposed?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Holy cow. Didn't realize there is an entire /4 reserved for
| future use.
| yardstick wrote:
| 240/4 can be hijacked/used as private IP space currently by
| a lot of devices. I think Windows might be the hold out.
| But for internal routing and IoT it's very useful. Can
| never be used as publicly routable space.
|
| I'd like to see it added to the official list of private
| space alongside RFC1918.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Not sure why you'd need more than 10/8, but I suppose it
| looks even cooler too those who know and find such things
| cool.
|
| Does Windoze prevent you from using certain IPv4
| addresses?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Aws sized companies, we also use them in aws. And no
| doesn't work on windows.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Not sure why you 'd need more than 10/8_
|
| Large organizations have moved to IPv6 because they, and
| everyone else, are using 10/8, and so when mergers and
| acquisitions happen trying to connect the networks
| together becomes a nightmare.
|
| See this talk from Wells Fargo as an example:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzTWjNUb4H4
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-
| unicast... is a nice historical overview of 240/4
| teddyh wrote:
| Why? It would be to the benefit of relatively few and be an
| enormous technical problem for decades for everyone. If we
| did this, the IPv4 addresses would run out again after a
| few months at most, leaving us all in the same position we
| are in today, but also with a huge technical problem of
| fixing all the old devices which had these now-repurposed
| networks hardcoded.
|
| If you are fine with doing the work of obsoleting old
| equipment, then just _start using IPv6_.
| Faaak wrote:
| and what, earn 5 more years till we have the same problem?
| RedShift1 wrote:
| That's a problem for the people in 5 years
| icedchai wrote:
| At this point, time would be better spent moving to IPv6,
| don't you think?
| mike_d wrote:
| We have been trying to deploy IPv6 for 20 years now. This
| would be comparatively easier and buy us another 20 years
| to finish v6 deployment.
| zamadatix wrote:
| And 50% of the internet traffic is IPv6. The proposal
| here is to introduce a separate (arguably harder) change
| which would start at 0% support again. Beyond that, it'd
| just be a temporary fix.
|
| Just 240/4 allowed specifically for private network use
| (like the 10/8 range)... that I could get behind though.
| This would still exclude 255.255.255.255/32 of course.
| icedchai wrote:
| A ton of old equipment would need to be upgraded to use
| 240/4 for IPv4 unicast. We'd run into weird issues where
| it works for some people and not others. I'm not
| convinced. If this was done 25 years ago, maybe.
| 9dev wrote:
| Does anyone know what the red striped sections are? Hovering
| them only yields < _< range> is excluded from scanning_, but
| that doesn't say much
| gnfargbl wrote:
| They're part of AS749, which is US Department of Defense IP
| space that appears to be unused and which, based on public
| statements made by the Pentagon, might just be safely parked
| or might be part of a network scanning observatory [1].
| Either way, scanning that space is probably a waste of
| bandwidth.
|
| [1] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ip-address-squatting
| wereHamster wrote:
| > Either way, scanning that space is probably a waste of
| bandwidth
|
| That's what the DoD wants you to think ;)
| blahlabs wrote:
| Maybe a bit off topic, but years ago I had a home linux
| server, used for usenet/torrenting. I was just poking about
| on it one day and ran some variation of netstat and could
| see a connection with a 6.x.x.x range IP address, which
| stood out. I didn't know a whole lot about networking at
| the time (still don't), couldn't say if I had
| misinterpreted what I saw in the netstat output. But it
| stood out so I looked it up and hoo-boy, it was a shock to
| see who owned that IP range, Army Information Systems
| Centre. I chalked it up to them maybe running a torrent
| tracker or something, or was the DoD in my PC?
| bugsMarathon88 wrote:
| Service providers (especially mobile ones) often squat on
| large, unused IP blocks (of which the DoD has plenty of),
| especially at peak capacity. I suspect this is what
| occurred here.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'd guess they bought a whole block early on because they could
| and it wasn't too expensive yet. I wonder if they could be
| compelled to auction it off. But they might be using it a lot
| internally.
|
| (a lot of guesswork in this comment, I don't know anything lol)
| bananapub wrote:
| no, no one bought anything, they just emailed some dude and
| said "hey we're connecting to The Internet, we need some IPs"
| and the reply was "here is the 2^24 IP addresses dedicated to
| you".
| everfrustrated wrote:
| In the early days no money changed hands at all. You just
| asked for a block and got one.
| jaza wrote:
| See "List of assigned /8 blocks to commercial organizations"
| at:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
|
| Mercedes-Benz isn't the only corporation with its own /8 block
| - although it is the only non-US one; and it's a pretty small
| exclusive list, only six in total. I guess someone at Mercedes-
| Benz just happened to hear about this Internet thing relatively
| early (53.0.0.0/8 was registered Oct 1993 according to
| Wikipedia - the relevant European authority, RIPE NCC, was only
| founded in Apr 1992), and/or happened to have a buddy at IANA /
| RIPE NCC, and the rest is history.
| justusthane wrote:
| The XKCD Map of the Internet is good too (2006):
| https://www.xkcd.com/195/
| tomhow wrote:
| Previously:
|
| _BGP.Tools: Browse the Internet Ecosystem_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36531988 - June 2023 (17
| comments)
| thisisgvrt wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83NJllv0q9U was a nice behind the
| cover peek into how the data is collected and parsed.
| j4nek wrote:
| bgp.tools is one of my most used sites - thanks to ben for doing
| this so great!
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(page generated 2025-07-24 23:01 UTC)